1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to tools for data processing, and more particularly related to tools for patent-centric and group-oriented data processing.
2. Related Art
Patents are becoming more and more important to a business's success, especially in today's global economy. Patents can be viewed as a new type of currency in this global economy because they grant the holder with a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the patented technology. In some industries, product turnover is fairly rapid. However, core technology, product features, and markets change at a much slower rate. Accordingly, even in fast-moving industries, patents which cover core technology are very valuable at protecting a company's research and development investment for an extended period of time.
Patents are also valuable as revenue generators. In 1993, for example, the revenue generated from patents by U.S. companies was over $60 billion. Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1994. These patent revenue dollars are rising each year.
Patents are further valuable because they collectively represent a vast technological database. Much of this database is only available as issued patents (i.e., it is not released in any other form). According to Larry Kahaner's book, Competitive Intelligence, Simon & Schuster, 1996, "More than 75 percent of the information contained in U.S. patents is never released anywhere else."
If corporations searched this database before developing and releasing new products they might be able to avoid costly patent infringement litigation. Often, however, corporations do not conduct such patent searches. One significant reason for this is the difficulty in identifying relevant patents, and the difficulty in analyzing patents. Computerized search tools are becoming available to the public, such as web sites on the Internet, that can be used to conduct patent searches. Many companies and practitioners are reluctant to use such tools, however, due to the concern that their highly sensitive patent searches will not be maintained in confidence when using such tools.
More and more corporations are recognizing the value of patents. The number of patents applied for and issued to U.S. companies is increasing every year, especially in fast moving industries such as computer software and biotechnology. Many international companies have also recognized the value of patents. In fact, foreign companies regularly rank among the leaders in issued U.S. patents.
Of course, not all patents are as valuable to the patent owner or patent licensees as others. Some owned or licensed patents provide little or no value to the corporate entity. These patents become a drain on corporate resources, both in obtaining the patents, paying maintenance fees, and paying license fees. It is difficult for corporations to assess the value of their patents because automated tools for patent analysis do not exist.
Yet, for all the heightened awareness being paid to patents in some quarters, patents remain one of the most underutilized assets in a company's portfolio. This is due, at least in significant part, to the fact that patent analysis, whether for purposes of licensing, infringement, enforcement, freedom to operate, technical research, product development, etc., is a very difficult, tedious, time consuming, and expensive task, particularly when performed with paper copies of patents.
Software providers have been slow in developing software tools for aiding in the patent analysis process. As a result, there are few automated tools for patent analysis currently available. There are software tools available for managing corporate patent prosecution and payment of maintenance fees, such as products from Master Data Corporation. The patent analysis capabilities of these tools are limited. These tools, for example, cannot be used to facilitate the analysis and development of business strategies to increase corporate shareholder value through the strategic and tactical use of patents.
A number of patent searching tools are available, such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Automated Patent System (APS), and the on-line search services offered by Lexis and Westlaw. Other providers of patent information and patent search tools include Derwent, MicroPatent, Questel, Corporate Intelligence, STN, IFI/Plenum, The Shadow Patent Office (EDS), IBM, and CAS. These tools are not analysis tools. Instead, they are search tools. These tools enable a user to identify patents that satisfy a specified key word search criteria. In essence, these tools provide the user with the ability to possibly find "the needle-in-the-haystack." However, these tools have limited, if any, automated functions to aid a user in analyzing the patents, whether the company's own patents or those of competitors, for the purpose of making tactical and strategic business decisions based on the patents.
SmartPatents Inc. (SPI) of Mountain View, Calif., provides electronic tools for analyzing patents. These tools, collectively called the SmartPatent Workbench, are very useful for analyzing patents. With the SmartPatent Workbench, a user can view the text and image of a patent, conduct text searches in the patent, copy and paste portions of the patent to other documents, build a case of patents, annotate the case and the patents in the case, import and export patents and cases, etc. The SmartPatent Workbench is commercially available from SPI, and is described in a number of publicly available documents, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,623,679 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,623,681, incorporated by reference herein.
The SmartPatent Workbench is a patent analysis tool. The SmartPatent Workbench is primarily designed to assist a user in working with a single patent or a small collection of patents at a time. However, there are many instances when it would be very beneficial to be able to automatically and simultaneously analyze, correlate, or otherwise process multiple patents.
For example, in some instances it would be beneficial to automatically analyze the inventorship of a collection of patents. More particularly, it would be beneficial to identify the persons who are named most frequently on a collection of patents. It would be very useful if this task could be performed automatically. However, no existing software tools can perform this task automatically.
For the most part, existing patent-related tools can process only the information contained in patents. (It is noted, however, that the SmartPatent Workbench has functions to annotate patents with any information, whether or not patent related, and has additional functions to search within annotations.) These tools do not have functions for correlating, analyzing, and otherwise processing patent-related information with non-patent related information, including but not limited to corporate operational data, financial information, production information, human resources information, and other types of corporate information. Such non-patent information is critically important when evaluating the full strategic and tactical value and applicability of any given patent, or developing a corporate patent business strategy for gaining competitive advantage and increasing shareholder value based on patents.
Consider, for example, FIG. 1. A typical corporation 102 includes a research and development (R&D) department 104, a finance department 112, a manufacturing department 108, and a legal department 116 (that includes a licensing department 122 and a patent department 124). In the course of performing their respective duties, these departments generate, collect, and maintain information, such as R&D information 106, financial information 114, manufacturing information 110 (such as bill of material information), licensing information 118, and patent information 120 (that includes the patents obtained by the company, and perhaps patents obtained by competitors).
A business analyst 126 may be assigned the job of evaluating the value of the corporation's patent portfolio (represented as part of the patent information 120). In order to fully and accurately analyze the value and applicability of the corporation's patent portfolio, the analyst 126 should ideally take into account non-patent information, such as R&D information 106, financial information 114, manufacturing information 110, and licensing information 118.
For example, a patent's value may be linked to whether it covers technology that the corporation is currently using, or that the corporation may use in the future. Thus, an analysis of the patent should include an analysis of and correlation with manufacturing information 110 and R&D information 106. Also, a patent's value may be linked to whether it has generated licensing revenue. Thus, an analysis of the patent should include an analysis of and correlation with licensing information 118. Further, a patent's value may be linked to the degree of success of the corporation's commercial products that correspond to the patent (i.e., the commercial embodiments of the patented technology). Thus, an analysis of the patent should include an analysis of and correlation with financial information 114.
The processing described above, however, is usually not done (or it is done in an ad hoc, unorganized, incomplete, inefficient, and/or ineffective manner) because it is difficult or, in many cases, impossible to manually collect, organize, correlate, and process all of the information pertinent to the patents under study. Often times, it is a difficult or even impossible task to simply identify the relevant patents. Accordingly, it would be very beneficial to have automated tools that automatically process patent-related information and non-patent related information for making corporate business decisions. Existing patent-related tools do not have this capability.